So much for hunting

What frustrated me most about the game as I sat there literally on the top row of Jordan-Hare Stadium was the passivity Georgia showed once Auburn got the lead.

Watch Aaron Davis on this play.

Gus is at it again. "GET IT TO HIM! GET IT TO HIM!" pic.twitter.com/0NLvWikBNv

— War Room Eagle (@WarRoomEagle) November 12, 2017

What was he doing there?  Spectators normally have to pay for a ticket.  You can tell Parrish was expecting help from the inside that never arrived.

Some mental mistakes showed up as stupid penalties, but there were plenty of moments when players simply didn’t look like their heads were in the game.

If you’re talking passive, though, I can’t say there was a player who did anything that could touch the gutlessness of Smart’s call at the end of the first half when Georgia got the ball back, trailing 16-7.

The play call was set up by the best late first half game management of the season.  Smart played into Malzahn’s natural conservatism, using his remaining time outs to force a punt from the Auburn 14-yard line with 22 seconds left in the half, a punt that Mecole Hardman promptly returned to the Auburn 26.  With 17 seconds left, even with no time outs, Georgia had two shots it could have taken into the end zone and still left enough time on the clock to attempt a field goal.

Instead, they opted to run Michel into the line, netted a whopping one yard, called for a spike to stop the clock and then sent the field goal team out.

Forget that Blankenship missed the attempt.  The message Smart sent to his team was that he was coaching scared.  He didn’t exactly back away from that either as the teams went to the locker room.

As he was coming off the field, CBS sideline reporter Allie LaForce caught up with Smart as asked him if he regretted not being more aggressive with his team down by nine points in hostile territory.

“We probably should have,” Smart replied. “We thought they’d be playing more of a soft defense so we thought we might hit a run in there, but at the end of the day we’re trying to get a field goal. We thought we could get a couple of yards for the kicker and didn’t.”

I tweeted this during the halftime break.

If there was ever a time for Georgia to regroup at halftime, it's now.

— Senator Blutarsky (@MummePoll) November 11, 2017

 

What, though, was Smart supposed to tell those kids in the locker room about being the hunters, not the hunted?  “Do as I say, not as I do”?

All in all, it was a reminder that this team and its head coach still have farther to go on their journey along the learning curve.

The rise and fall of a Champion for Life

Booch gets the ax.

BREAKING Butch Jones is out as #Vols head coach, source tells me. He just informed his staff.

— Bruce Feldman (@BruceFeldmanCFB) November 12, 2017

If I’m not mistaken, he’ll have over $8 million coming to him from UT in the buyout.  No word on whether he gets to keep the trash can.

So, that means UF and UT are both in the hunt for new head coaches.  I wonder when the last time that happened.

***********************************************************************

UPDATE:  “He said he didn’t really expect that to happen, but it did so he told me to find a place to go, quickly … and that if he gets anything he will contact me.”

Misery loves company, part two

This is the look of a man who realizes that karma owns his ass.

goodness gracious pic.twitter.com/NyGHheLuAO

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) November 12, 2017

Think he misses Wisconsin just a little?

Misery loves company, part one

If you’re the Tennessee Volunteer band, you play “Rocky Top”.  It’s what you do.

Tennessee 17, Missouri 50.

They're playing Rocky Top for the blocked extra point.

— RockyTopTalk (@RockyTopTalk) November 12, 2017

Every week it seems like there’s a new metaphor for the season Booch is having.

If you’re a Georgia fan feeling a little sorry for yourself…

… just imagine what Greg McGarity’s experiencing this morning.  It’s not just the blowout on the Plains — don’t forget those extra donations to get your SECCG tickets, suckers! — or Miami’s destruction of a Notre Dame team that Georgia squeaked by that’s disheartening, it’s that he’s going to have the Richt narrative thrown in his face by the national media at least until the outcome of the ACC championship game.  Or maybe later.

That’s a shame.

Well, that sure sucked.

Relax.  I’m not going to give you one of those despairing existential posts it seems like I crank every other season or so.  Not because yesterday wasn’t a failure of epic proportion — it sure as hell was, on a number of levels — but because it’s too early to know what the context of the beat down turns out to be.

Maybe it’s a one-off, or maybe it’s an indication, just like the 2015 Alabama game, that this program isn’t capable of playing on the big stage in a consistent manner.  At this moment, I don’t know which is true, and none of you do, either.

Right now, I’m with Smart on this.  He delivered the perfect epitaph for yesterday’s disaster when he said, “This team will be defined by how they respond, not by what they did [Saturday].” 

That’s exactly right.  Either the players and coaches get their collective heads together, regroup and finish out the last three games of the regular season (yes, they’re still going to Atlanta to play for a conference title) playing at the high level we think they’re capable of showing, or they stumble their way through the Kentucky and Tech games and take another ass-whipping from a team from Alabama.

While I don’t know which of those two is in Georgia’s future, one thing I can say for sure is that Kirby’s mission has gotten much simpler.  He’s not thinking about the playoffs or the polls, or worrying about whether his players are thinking about them.  He’s consumed with finding the reset button.

As Mike Tyson once famously said, “Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.”  The Dawgs got punched in the mouth by one of their bitter rivals.  It turned out there was no plan last night after that happened.  We’ll see if that’s the case for the rest of the season soon enough.